“I can teach you,” she said.
“I THINK HE’S got a natural talent for it,” she told Cory.
“Sure,” he said. “Everybody does.”
“Well, maybe his strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure. Maybe he has the simple single-mindedness of a child. Whatever he’s got, the clouds of America aren’t safe with him on the loose.”
“Hmmm,” he said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I was just going to say not to expect miracles. You gave him a great gift, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be elected class president or captain of the football team. He’ll still be a basically shy boy with a basically difficult situation at home and not too much going for him in the rest of the world. Maybe he can disappear clouds, but that doesn’t mean he can move mountains.”
“Killjoy.”
“I just—”
“He can do something rare and magical,” she said, “and it’s his secret, and it’s something for him to cling to while he grows up and gets out of that horrible household. You should have seen his face when that very first cloud caved in and gave up the ghost. Cory, he looked transformed.”
“And he’s still a nice quiet boy?”
“He’s a lovely boy,” she said.
THE WINDOW GLASS was no problem.
She’d thought it might be, that was why they’d gone all the way out into the country, but it turned out the glass was no problem at all. Whatever it was that got the cloud, it went right through the glass the same way your vision did.
She was in the front of the room now, thrusting a pointer at the pulled down map of the world, pointing out the oil-producing nations. He turned and looked out the window.
The clouds were the wrong kind.
A tree surgeon’s pickup truck, its rear a jumble of sawn limbs, slowed almost to a stop, then moved on across the intersection. Jeremy looked down at the stop sign. A few days ago he’d spent most of math period trying to make the stop sign disappear, and there it was, same as ever, slowing the cars down but not quite bringing them to a halt. And that night he’d sat in his room trying to disappear a sneaker, and of course nothing had happened.
Because that wasn’t how it worked. You couldn’t take something and make it stop existing, any more than a magician could really make an object vanish. But clouds were masses of water vapor held together by—what? Some kind of energy, probably. And the energy that he sent out warred with the energy that held the water vapor particles together, and the particles went their separate ways, and that was the end of the cloud. The particles still existed but they were no longer gathered into a cloud.
So you couldn’t make a rock disappear. Maybe, just maybe, if you got yourself tuned just right, you could make a rock crumble into a little pile of dust. He hadn’t been able to manage that yet, and he didn’t know if it was really possible, but he could see how it might be.
In the front of the room Ms. Winspear indicated oil-producing regions of the United States. She talked about the extraction of oil from shale, and he smiled at the mental picture of a rock crumbling to dust, with a little stream of oil flowing from it.
He looked out the window again. One of the bushes in the foundation planting across the street had dropped its leaves. The bushes on either side of it looked healthy, but the leaves of the one bush had turned yellow and fallen overnight.
Two days ago he’d looked long and hard at that bush. He wondered if it was dead, or if it had just sickened and lost its leaves. Maybe that was it, maybe they would grow back.
He rubbed his wrist. It had been out of the cast for months, it never bothered him, but in the past few days it had been hurting him some. As if he was feeling pain now that he hadn’t allowed himself to feel when the wrist broke.
He was starting to feel all sorts of things.
Ms. Winspear asked a question, something about oil imports, and a hand went up in the fourth row. Of course, he thought. Tracy Morrow’s hand always went up. She always knew the answer and she always raised her hand, the little snot.
For a moment the strength of his feeling surprised him. Then he took two deep breaths, in and out, in and out, and stared hard at the back of Tracy’s head.
Just to see.
The End
The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons
Chapter One
Excerpt Copyright © 2013, Lawrence Block
AROUND 11:15 ON a Tuesday morning in May, I was perched on my stool behind the counter at Barnegat Books. I was reading Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart, even as I was keeping a lazy eye on a slender young woman in jeans and sandals. Her khaki shirt had those little tabs to secure the sleeves when you rolled them up, and a scant inch of tattoo peeked out from under one rolled-up sleeve. I couldn’t make out the image, there wasn’t enough showing, and I didn’t bother to guess, or to speculate on what hidden parts of her anatomy might sport further tattoos. I was paying more attention to the capacious tote bag hanging from her shoulder, and the Frank Norris novel that had engaged her interest.
For I shall consider my cat, Geoffrey, I read, and looked over to the window to consider my own cat, Raffles. There’s a portion of the window ledge that the sun manages to find on clear days, and that’s his favorite spot, rain or shine. Sometimes he stretches, in the manner of his tribe, and sometimes his paws move as he dreams of mice. At the moment he was doing nothing, as far as I could tell.
My customer, on the other hand, had fetched a cell phone from her tote bag. She’d put the book down, and her thumbs were busy. At length she returned the phone to her bag and, beaming, brought Frank Norris to the counter.
“I’ve been looking all over for this,” she said, triumphantly. “And I’ve had a terrible time, because I couldn’t remember the title or the author.”
“I can see how that might complicate things for you.”
“But when I saw the book,” she said, brandishing the object in question, “it, like, rang a bell.”
“Ah.”
“And I looked through it, and this is it.”
“The very volume you’ve been seeking.”
“Yeah, isn’t that awesome? And you know what’s even better?”
“What?”
“It’s on Kindle. Isn’t that fantastic? I mean, here’s a book more than a hundred years old, and it’s not like it was Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick, you know?”
Eat your heart out, Frank Norris.
“Like, they’re popular, so you’d expect to be able to get them in eBooks. But The Pit? Frank Norris? And yet I Googled it and there it was, and a couple of clicks and I own it.”
“Just like that,” I said.
“Isn’t it great? And you know what it cost?”
“Probably less than the book you’re holding.”
She checked the penciled price on the inside cover. “Fifteen dollars. Which is fair enough, I mean it’s like a hundred years old and a hardcover book and all. But you want to know what I just paid?”
“I’d love to.”
“Two ninety-nine.”
“Awesome,” I said.
CAROLYN KAISER, WHO washes dogs two doors down the street at the Poodle Factory, is my best friend and, more often than not, my lunch companion. Whoever’s turn it is picks up food at a nearby restaurant and brings it to the other’s place of business. It was her turn, and an hour after the girl with the peekaboo tattoo left poor old Frank Norris on my counter, Carolyn breezed in and began dishing out dejeuner a deux.
“Juneau Lock?”
“Juneau Lock,” she agreed.
“I wonder what it is.”
She took a bite, chewed, swallowed, and considered the matter. “I couldn’t even guess the animal,” she said. “Let alone what part of the animal.”
“It could be almost anything.”
“I know.”
“Whatever this dish is,” I said, “I don’t think we’ve had it before.”
“It’s always differen
t,” she said, “and it’s always sensational.”
“Or even awesome,” I said, and told her about Frank Norris and the girl with the tattoo.
“Maybe it was a dragon.”
“The tattoo? Or our lunch?”
“Either one. She used your bookshop to figure out what book she wanted, and then she bought the eBook from Amazon and bragged about what a deal she got.”
“It didn’t come off like bragging,” I said. “She was letting me be a part of her triumph.”
“And rubbing your nose in it, Bern. And you don’t even seem all that upset.”
“I don’t?” I thought about it. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’m not. She was so innocent about it, you know? ‘Isn’t it great how I saved myself twelve bucks?’ ” I shrugged. “At least I got the book back. I was afraid she was going to steal it.”
“In a manner of speaking,” she said, “she did. But if you’re cool with it, I don’t see why I should be pissed off on your behalf. This is great food, Bern.”
“The best.”
“Two Guys From Taichung. I wonder if I’m pronouncing it correctly.”
“I’m pretty sure you got the first three words right.”
“The first three words,” she said, “never change.”
The restaurant, on the corner of Broadway and East Eleventh Street, across the street from the Bum Rap, has had the same sign for almost as long as I’ve had the bookshop. But it’s changed owners and ethnicities repeatedly over the years, and each new owner (or pair of owners) has painted over the last word on the sign. Two Guys From Tashkent gave way to Two Guys From Guayaquil, which in turn yielded to Two Guys From Phnom Penh. And so on.
We began to take the closings for granted—it was evidently a hard-luck location—and whenever we started to lose our taste for the current cuisine, we could look forward to whatever would take its place. And, while we rarely went more than a few days without a lunch from Two Guys, there were plenty of alternatives—the deli, the pizza place, the diner.
Then Two Guys From Kandahar threw in the towel, and Two Guys From Taichung opened up shop, and everything changed.
“I’LL BE CLOSING early,” I told Carolyn.
“Today’s the day, huh?”
“And tonight’s the night. I thought I might get back downtown in time to meet you at the Bum Rap, but where’s the sense in that?”
“Especially since you’d be drinking Perrier. Bern? You want me to tag along?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure? Because it’d be no problem for me to close early. I’ve got a Borzoi to blow dry, and his owner’s picking him up at three, and even if she runs late I can be out of there by three-thirty. I could keep you company.”
“You were with me on the reconnaissance mission.”
“Casing the joint,” she said with relish. “Nothing to it. Piece of cake.”
“I think it’s better if I solo this time around.”
“I could watch your back.”
“I don’t want to give their security cameras a second look at you. Once is fine but twice is suspicious.”
“I could wear a disguise.”
“No, I’ll be disguised,” I said. “And a key part of my disguise is that this time around I won’t be accompanied by a diminutive woman with a lesbian haircut.”
“I guess diminutive sounds better than short,” she said. “And it’s not exactly a lesbian haircut, but I take your point. So how about if I hang out down the block? No? Okay, Bern, but I’ll have my cell with me. If you need me—”
“I’ll call. But that’s not likely. I’ll just steal the book and go home.”
“Check Amazon first,” she said. “See if it’s on Kindle. Maybe you can save yourself a trip.”
* * *
The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons
About the Author
Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His most recent novels are Hit Me, featuring Keller, and A Drop of the Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, who will be played by Liam Neeson in the forthcoming film, A Walk Among the Tombstones. Several of his other books have been filmed, although not terribly well. He’s well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, and The Liar’s Bible. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.
Email:
[email protected] Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
Website: LB’s Blog
Facebook: lawrence.block
Website: lawrenceblock.com
* * *
More Story Collections
available at
Enough Rope
The Night and the Music
Catch and Release
For a list of all my available fiction, go to Books on the Lawrence Block website.
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Lawrence Block
Lawrence Block, The Boy Who Disappeared Clouds
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